Guild Wars - Sequel Interview #1 @ CVG

The first part of an interview with Arenanet's Jeff Strain and Ben Miller is up at CVG, discussing Guild Wars 2:

In what major ways does the experience you plan to offer with Guild Wars 2 differ from what you've offered with Guild Wars?

Jeff Strain: I think, first and foremost, one of the biggest differences that people will perceive in the world between Guild Wars 2 and the first campaigns is that it's much more of a living, breathing world. In Guild Wars, we were able to tell very specific and very grand stories through the use of our instancing technology and the way we structured the campaigns. Each campaign had a big epic story and we were really able to cast you as the hero of that story.

In Guild Wars 2, we want to retain our ability to do that, but rather than telling one big monolithic story our goal is to pursue story arcs and story bubbles - that players can choose to take their characters into a story arc and maybe there a several missions and persistent areas that'll tie that together. And there's going to be numerous of these story arcs throughout the world. What we want to do is adopt more of a sandbox mentality, that players can direct their own play and pace to a much greater degree than they could in Guild Wars 1.

So, the way we kind of say it is that in Guild Wars 2 we're building a world and all the mechanics that go along with that world and then we will tell stories within that world, whereas in the original Guild Wars it was more that we were telling this big story and developing the world to fit that story.